Browsing: Operations

By Jason Scharfman Esq., CFE, CRISC, CAMS, CAIA Managing Partner, Corgentum Consulting As an operational due diligence (ODD) professional who performs ODD reviews of alternative investment managers on behalf of institutional investors and family offices, I have noticed a recent increase not only in the number of ODD reviews investorsRead More

The FICC Market Standards Board Ltd. (FMSB) is a London-based standards body for participants in the wholesale fixed income, currencies, and commodities (FICC) markets. It has been looking into the root causes of market misconduct, and pursuant to that research it recently published a report on the “themes and challenges”Read More

Keith Black, PhD, CFA, CAIA, FDP, Managing Director of Content Strategy, CAIA Association Michael Oliver Weinberg and Peter Strikwerda work at the Dutch pension fund APG and serve as the head of hedge funds and alternative alpha and the global head of digital and innovation, respectively. CAIA Association and FDPRead More

Keith Black, PhD, CFA, CAIA, FDP, Managing Director of Content Strategy at CAIA Association Do you want to be in the room where it happens, when “The Smartest Guys in the Room”* are plotting their fraud and trying to prevent the demise of Enron? Look around at how lucky weRead More

What’s in the future for alternative investments asset management? A new publication from Ernst & Young, London, contends that allocations to alternative investments and are “robust,” but that there is an important shift underway in favor of private equity and at the expense of hedge funds. In 2018, 40% ofRead More

There are reports that Google is preparing an announcement of “quantum supremacy” for later this year. If true, this is the biggest tech story since the transistor replaced vacuum tubes. It could be a disruptive development for just about every business with an IT department. Among much else, quantum supremacyRead More

Why can’t a fund manager simply subtract all fees and expenses from gross returns and present the arithmetical result to existing or potential investors? In a newly released paper, Donald Steinbrugge, the founder and CEO of Agecroft Partners, discusses how hedge funds calculate and present their net performance, and theRead More

Cushman & Wakefield, Chicago, has released a discussion of blockchains in connection with real estate. The paper argues that the technology could “transform CRE transactions ranging from property listings, asset management, and the purchase and sale of properties.” It reminds us that blockchains are shared digital ledgers, both tamper-proof andRead More

Daniel Hill, a research analyst for the global equity team at William Blair, has written an insightful piece about the hot competition for data scientists underway in the alpha-seeking world today.  Hill begins with the observation that there are lots of different buzzwords, hashtag-worthy words and phrases, at use inRead More

Two scholars, Shubeur Rahman and Ranjan Bhaduri, have in a new paper taken a fresh look at a long-standing dilemma in the alternative investments industry. The question is: how should investors in hedge funds (especially in a multi-asset class, multi-strategy portfolio of hedge funds) measure the market risk inherent inRead More

Activist hedge funds can always be expected to trade both in lit exchanges and in dark pools, in the course of accumulating the equity stake that in turn will give them sway at an annual meeting or inside the boardroom. That is one inference from a model developed for theRead More

A new article by Dave Dowsett and Heather Wied, both of Invesco, looks at blockchains and the way this new technology, precisely as it divorces itself from its original significance as a feature of the cryptocurrencies, is ready to transform finance. Dowsett and Wied contend that blockchain “offers the possibilityRead More

I write these words soon after reading the news from Sundra Strait, Indonesia. In recent days, the eruption and collapse of a volcano there has set off a tsunami that in turn has devastated the coastal regions of Banten and Lampung, also in Indonesia. Much time may have to passRead More

McGraw Hill Education has brought out a new book by Bruce I. Jacobs, of Jacobs Levy Equity Management. The book, Too Smart for our Own Good, concerns “ingenious investment strategies, illusions of safety, and market crashes.” The thesis is that the financial crises of recent decades are the consequence ofRead More

KPMG, the auditing giant based in the Netherlands, has put out a white paper on the “digitization mandate” in the alternative investment space.  It maintains that fund managers who “dawdle” in digitizing their business are acting foolishly, falling behind the expectations of their actual and potential investors. Consider fees. PreqinRead More

Yes, it sounds a bit like the phrase “jumbo shrimp,” in terms of sense, but a “long short-term memory neural network” is an important recent advance in artificial intelligence research. The term refers to a neural network devised with “forget gates” attached to cells of memory, originally in order toRead More

In a recent white paper, a trend analyst and a portfolio manager at Robeco put their heads together to look at the value of blockchains, or more formally of “distributed ledger technology,” in the financial world. Jeroen van Oerle (the analyst) and Patrick Iemmens (the manager) contend that there isRead More

KPMG International and CREATE-Research have jointly prepared a report about the digitization imperative for alternative investment management. The report includes within that term both hedge funds and private equity. Early on, its authors list eight key digital innovations that are reconstructing the industry: Application programming interfaces; cognitive technology and machineRead More

A new paper from PricewaterhouseCoopers on the coming transformations in the asset and wealth management industries says that firms in this market must adapt or die. And the adaptation the authors have in mind isn’t just the usual Darwinian metaphor – managers must “become business revolutionaries, even disruptors” in orderRead More

The Federal Reserve has issued a final rule relating to the qualified financial contracts (QFCs) of global systemically important U.S. banking institutions (GSIBs). Derivatives & Repo Report, a blog maintained by the international law firm Perkins Coie, has done a thorough write-up on the subject, to which the material belowRead More

The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), a provider of clearance, settlement, and a wide range of other services to the financial markets, has issued a new white paper on technological innovations and the disruptions fintech may generate. The report begins with a quotation from a speech given by LaelRead More

It has been 20 years since the Alternative Investment Management Association published its first due diligence questionnaire, a template designed to standardize the diligence process by which investors decide if a particular management is right for them. Now it has published a new questionnaire/template, covering a broader range of entities/strategies.Read More

A recent blog in the TABB Forum, by Chris Barnes of Clarus Financial Technology, looks at recent developments in the realm of MiFID, and looks forward. The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority in August of this year authorized certain Approved Publication Arrangements (APAs) for reporting under MiFID II.  The authorization ofRead More

A large team of officers and staff affiliated with the Federal Reserve (eight with the Board in DC, five with the FR Bank of New York, one with the FRB of Chicago) have collaborated on a new paper on distributed ledger technology in payments, clearing, and settlement. Of necessity, givenRead More

With a new administration in the making, thoughts in the world of asset management naturally turn to the issue of appointments to the Securities Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Who is likely to get what position and what difference might it make? Recent practice has been thatRead More

Mid-October news reports tell us that Navinder Sarao has lost his effort to avoid extradition from Britain to the United States. So he will face charges in the U.S. in connection with the “flash crash” of May 2010, the incident in which the DJIA fell 998.5 points in less thanRead More

Dissatisfaction with the fiat money issued by or on signals from central bankers will not go away. Talk of “printing press” money seems quaint, as when people of my generation still refer to a keyboard as a “typewriter.” Central banks and their servants (and their servers) around the world engage,Read More

Andrew Lo, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recently wrote a stimulating discussion of two seemingly contrary “laws”: Moore’s and Murphy’s. Read More

How sturdy can a bamboo bridge be? The front page of a new Guide from The Alternative Investment Management Association consists of a photo of a bamboo bridge, apparently on a beach, as seen from below. That is, this is the view of someone on whom the bridge would fall,Read More

The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation has issued a new white paper on block chains and their significance in the context of the post-trade landscape. Block chains, also known as distributed ledgers, are a hot new technology, made so in large part by the cryptocurrency Bitcoin and by the publicityRead More

It has been seven years and a few days more now since Bernard Madoff acknowledged to authorities that “there is no innocent explanation” for the story they had just heard from his sons. It has been 15 and a half years since Harry Markopoulos ran the numbers regarding Madoff’s performanceRead More

Trading on natural blocks is a very desirable goal. So why aren't more traders doing it? How hard are they trying? Some questions from a TABB paper, and from an intriguing commenter at TabbForum. Read More

The analytic company Convergence concludes from its research -- a study of 2,600 ADVs -- that there is a lot of variance in the “depth, breadth, and quality of expense disclosure practices” across fund types and strategies. Read More

God rested on the seventh day of the week of creation. Ever since, the number seven has stood for the completion of an epoch, or of a perfect set. Thus, a German enterprise concern has now listed the "seven pillars" for improved market surveillance through software.Read More

A new report from the World Bank says that six multilateral development banks delivered more than $28 billion in financing in 2014 that "address climate change" in one of two ways, mitigation or adaptation. Read More

The judge's ruling setting aside the jury's guilty verdict is, of course, grand news for Aleynikov. It is also the curtain on a sometimes farcical spectacle. But let us not forget that there are issues of principle involved. Read More

PwC offers a glimpse of a 'day in the life' of a typical compliance analyst in 2015 and again in 2020. As these authors tell it, the day is filled with data, darkness, and drudgery at present, but it will be airy, alliterative, and analytical in another five years. Read More

Spoofing is probably about as ubiquitous as texting-while-driving. And it is possible to make an example of a spoofer caught red-handed. But it isn't clear what purpose that will serve. The real problem is that a broken market contains a broken set of incentives. Read More

There was some excitement as recently as January 2015 over renewed talk of a Yahoo/AOL deal, but after the bloom finally came off that rose, YHOO settled into a trading range has been roughly from $42 to $46. Faille guesses that there is an opportunity here on the upside of that range, because another suitor is bound to appear.Read More

The Solicitor General, speaking for the United States, has filed the expected amicus brief in the Google/Oracle showdown. The SG's position is that the Supreme Court should refuse to hear the case so that the lower courts can get back to using what the brief calls the "flexible fair use doctrine" to do justice. Read More

How long will it take before the world again sees copper at around $10,000 a ton, the going price it touched (though briefly) in early 2011? Perhaps several more years and another full business cycle. There may be a lot of down before an upturn gets us there. Read More

High-stakes litigation between Google and Oracle approaches its resolution at the Supreme Court. For seekers of alpha, this isn't just about what investments to make, but about the way one goes about making them, the very mechanics of trading. Read More

The integration of data isn't fully on the hedge fund industry radar yet. Yet it may be critical to rebuilding manager-investor relations via whiz-bang 21st century technology. Read More

Look for the EC sometime in the near future to bring a complaint about the contracts into which Google has entered with manufacturers that require them to construct the handsets in a way that favors Google’s famous search engine [over, for example, Microsoft’s Bing.] But consider that even this preliminary skirmish over comparison shopping might be a bullish sign for GOOG.Read More

As a general rule, politicians [mostly] on the Democratic side benefit by raising the issue of the taxation of carried interest during campaigns and then quietly letting it die, as their donors expect, when the legislature is actually working on tax bills. It's a way of signaling who is a "populist" and who isn't. Read More

IT guys have been denigrating RadioShack, from their own perch of superiority, for a long time. The trouble is, while those IT guys were the future, RadioShack's customer base was fading into the past. Read More

The U.S. Department of Justice typically brings high-profile antitrust actions against 'monopolists' by piling its legal theories on top of dubious micro-economics. A recent announcement by Microsoft sends Faille down memory lane, to two 1990s era actions by the D of J against MS in the days when Bill Gates was still a great media ogre. Read More

This is the story of one high-frequency trading firm suing one or more others and giving detailed credence to everything that has been said over the last year or so by those who bemoan the rise of HFT firms. Read More

In some fairly routine middle-critter corporate roles, there may no longer be much need for human managerial involvement. Enter the self-running business entity: another big step toward the obsolescence of human beings some of whom, nonetheless, will get wealthy in the process. Read More

Regular readers of AllAboutAlpha know that Bayesianism, a movement with the world of probability and statistics, has a good deal to do with contemporary pricing models and portfolio theory. It also has foes in that world, the frequentists, and a 2012 cartoon, recently raised to salience again by a Facebook post, has given those frequentists reason to gripe about Bayesian smugness. Read More